“I left the chamber of death, and retired to the room I had used as a study. What was passing in my mind I am utterly unconscious of. The past, the present and the future, were mingled in one common chaos. I was lost in a reverie that seemed protracted beyond the years of man. Of the mass of confused and unintelligible ideas that were swarming in my brain, one at length stood out clear and distinct, and gathered strength as I brooded over it. It was self-destruction. It rose upon me, a cheering light, shedding gladness over my dark and desperate fortunes. The intolerable weight which had pressed upon my mind was at once uplifted, the pent-up agony which had racked my heart passed off, and visions of peace, of a deep, enduring calm, floated before me, unmixed with a doubt or dread of the untried future. There was a loaded pistol lying on the table; in an instant it was in my grasp, but heaven in its mercy saved me from that crime—a sudden icy pang transfixed me; utterly enfeebled I sank to the floor, my senses fled, and I was as one who is numbered with the dead, or who had never breathed among the living. “When reason was again restored to me, I found myself stretched upon a bed. I recognized the apartment in which I lay; it had been my wife’s. I tried to move, but had not the strength to do so. I heard a step in the room and essayed to speak; my voice was scarce a whisper; the light in the chamber was dim, but my {759} eyes could not endure it. I again closed them and sank into sleep. “When I awoke, a physician and a nurse were standing at the bed side. I would have spoken, but they bade me be quiet; and I was even as a child, and submitted. For many weeks had disease preyed upon me, and existence been suspended by a single thread which would not break. Slowly I recovered, my strength was restored to me, but never, from that day to the present moment, has this withered heart known peace. “I have but little more to say. From my medical attendant I learned that the young man who had been fleeced at the tavern, stung by remorse, and unable to make good the money he had lost, had swallowed a deadly draught. His aged father, stripped of his little all to pay the debt, broken-hearted by the villainy in which I had participated, was thrown with his helpless family upon the reluctant bounty of society. Wallis and Roberts had fled, it was supposed, to the South. My son had been taken home by his grandfather. I have never seen him since I pressed him to my bosom in his mother’s death chamber. He was and is dear to me as the hope of heaven to the martyr’s heart, but his eye shall never look upon the degraded being who gave him life.